


Familial Resonance

by WriterBloke



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-07-25
Updated: 2015-08-12
Packaged: 2018-04-11 03:37:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,278
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4419674
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WriterBloke/pseuds/WriterBloke
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>As Clarke wanders blindly away from her grief, she meets new friends who will help her heal and grow. However, when Lexa reappears in her life, Clarke will have to deal with both their emotional history and the new bond she has unwittingly forged between them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. One: It's the Thought that Counts

**Author's Note:**

> Clarke is in a pretty bad place at the start of this fic and her narrative reflects that.
> 
> I promise that future chapters will be longer with more plot and coherent thought.
> 
> Thank you for reading and I hope you enjoy.

She tallied them all up, an old method she was returning to. The only part of her old life she was returning to. 

As a child she used to count things when she was bored or lonely. She could tell you how many stripes were on her comforter, how many guards were on each shift, how many screws adorned the roof above her bed, how many hours her parents were called away, so busy sustaining the last hope for the human race they left her with nothing better to do than count and count.

Things got better after Well's dad got elected Chancellor. At first, she couldn’t figure out if it was the loneliest sort of companionship or the most intimate solitude. Eventually, it didn’t matter, they were friends as if she had never been alone, had each other as if they had never been apart.

Until they were.

She counted again for the first time in years locked in the skybox, the nuts and bolts and plates, three generations of slightly off colour repairs in her blanket. She drew, though sparingly as months of incarceration loomed between her arrest and her eighteenth birthday. She had lived her whole life rationing art supplies, but it was easier when she had other options to occupy her time. To pace herself, she counted the strokes of her pencil against the cool metal. When she had nothing else, she counted the sunrises cresting over the side of the Earth.

She would lie awake in the dark and trace her fingers over the watch her dad had left her, counting every scratch, nick and dent. She didn’t need to count them, didn’t need the light to know them. She had traced them a thousand times over the years, felt them grow in number. She could tell you her father’s explanations behind each one, whether it be a long winded play-by-play of how he nearly had to be cut out of a ventilation shaft after trying to retrieve a lost screw (but hey, Gregg owes me a week of dessert rations), or a half-asleep grunt after a particularly trying day (pure stubbornness). She wanted to be mad over the most recent addition, a longer scratch on the side courtesy of whichever guard threw her in her cell, but she could still hear her father tell her how glad he was for each and every mark, because they chronicled his life and gave him a reason to talk to her every night.

She wondered if he would say the same about the marks that now marred her skin: freckles from weeks lived under the sun, callouses from a new life of labour, scars, so many scars. Some from her first days on earth, turned white now. Some pink and new. Some still open wounds, barely healing without rest, bound to scar thicker and uglier without proper care. One, on her outer thigh, unnoticed while the adrenaline of battle flooded her system, was refusing to heal and probably in need of much more care than she was willing to give it.

She counted these scars but found it impossible.

She felt the pull of reconnecting flesh across her shoulder blades where she could not see. To look at her forearm, it was impossible to say if there was one, large graze or the result of several frantic journeys through the thick and unforgiving foliage.

She spent many days walking, thinking of counting things, thinking of old lives and new. Each step a desperate attempt to distend herself from her inner turmoil. Each one only exhausting her until she was no longer strong enough to carry that burden.

She tried to count the miles but it was pointless.

The days blurred as the forest grew thicker and the season grew darker. As sleeping was replaced by passing out, only to recover with no sense of the time gone by. Distance was meaningless as she was pretty sure she had left going north, but has hit every point of the compass since.

She was trying to assuage her guilt, or come to terms with it, or anything that stopped her from feeling like she was slowly turning into crumbling lead from the inside, out. Then her guilt would return tenfold, for surely, after everything, she deserved to feel that way. After the casualties of war or the price of leadership or whatever bullshit excuse. 

So she tallied them all up. All the lives, all the souls ripped from the earth with her name branding them. She counted and it was an endless cycle.

She thought of the mountain first, then Ton DC, then Finn. She thought of those she was too late to save and those she had killed herself. She counted all those who died, and moved on to all those forced to live with the consequences of her actions, those hurt or forever changed by the path she forged.

She thought of those she lost along the way. An already estranged mother who could no longer recognize her daughter. Jasper, from whom she'd taken Maya. Raven, who'd never truly forgive her for Finn. Octavia, who burns with the truth about the missile. Bellamy offering to share her burden, Bellamy who once couldn't kill his own friend out of mercy, what had she done to him.

It was useless to count, her guilt grew regardless, resting on her psyche until her list was convoluted and unrealistic. Anyone in a better state of mind than she would have said so. 

But she was not in her right state of mind. She was sore, tired, hungry, and past the point of assessing her time on earth, merely bringing each person and event into her fold of troubles, methodically building them up into the crushing weight resting on her shoulders.

It will never be known whether it was te shooting pain down her leg, pure exhaustion, or the depletion of her emotional stamina that brought her to the ground. Only that once she lay there, staring up at a gap in the trees, she did something she had never done before.

Clarke counted the stars.

They had always been too great, so completely innumerable that she had never bothered before. But surely they weren't as vast as the pain she felt, with lives weighing on her and the closest thing she had to family either gone or pushed away.

She remembered an old religious tale she had learnt in earth studies of a man told to count the stars so that he may have the family he dreamt of. She counted until she could no longer see straight, this singular yearning passing through her eyes along with the image of remorseful green eyes she refused to acknowledge.

Despite this, no one could predict what was to happen when the sun rose.


	2. We Are Not Afraid of the Dark but of What it Hides

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this took so long, I've been on my hols and wifi has been chancy at best for me these past few weeks.  
> Also sorry that this is still all Clarke even though I promised dialogue, next time, I promise.

In all the movies she had seen, there were always bright lights, suspicious murmurings, anything to indicate by frightening contrast that you were waking up in a different situation from however you fell asleep.

Perhaps that’s why it was especially disconcerting that Clarke awoke to the same silent, dark stillness that had held her under. She heard nothing, saw nothing, and would believe herself to be dreaming if it weren’t for the fact that sleep had shown her nothing but lifeless eyes and hateful glares since she had left the Mountain.

As she blinked several times to ensure her eyes were actually open they started to adjust slightly to the oppressive gloom around her. Just enough for her to know she definitely wasn’t in the forest anymore, actually, wasn’t outside at all.

She would go as far as to say that she wasn’t in a tent, unless it were a particularly sturdy tent that would have to belong to a particular important person who Clarke was sure was not going to invite her back into her tent anytime soon. She knew she probably wasn’t in a cave, due to the lack of moisture in the air.

(She would later give thought to how, suddenly, these options fell after she had determined she was not outside. Caves and tents, while distant dreams and mysteries growing up on the Ark, had definitely been considered outside, but now was so not the time to ponder culture and adaption.)

She knew for a fact she wasn’t on the Ark for since living on the ground with all the fresh air she had become aware of a stale, metallic taste that had lingered at the back of her tongue for nearly eighteen years until she took her first breath on Earth.

She wanted to feel proud of how improved her instincts were since those naive first moments but found it impossible without dwelling on the one who had pushed her to grow, adapt with her incessant goddamn lessons.

Nevertheless she had checked of a good list of places she wasn’t, which left her with a depressingly infinite amount of places she could be so she strained her eyes to pick out further details while she pushed herself up with her elbows.

After several long minutes of squinting and peering she finally thought she had spotted something, anything. She hoped she did. God, she fucking hoped so. After everything that had happened she wasn’t really afraid any more. There was definitely some healthy concern but mostly she was just fed up. If it was anything it was a chink of light a couple feet away from where she was lying but it was faint, and had a tendency to come and go as she tried to get a better look, so it could have been nothing but the delusions of a confused and desperate mind.

Deciding her head, although it was aching and disoriented, was as clear as it was gonna get for the time being she thought it was best that she figure out if her legs where even capable of carrying her the few feet to the maybe-light.

Sitting up fully, Clarke figured she could hold her legs straight no problem, but felt a hot pain flash through her right thigh and hip as she brought her knees to her chest. While concerning, she decided it was good enough for her to get away and reassess later.

Rolling forward from her balled up position into a crouched, she pushed herself up into a standing position while favoring her left leg and bracing a hand on the wall closest to where her head had been moments before.

Her leg would be a bitch, and she had no idea what awaited her when she reached the source of the light, who awaited her, but she was Clarke fucking Griffin and she had been through so much it didn't matter if she low key wanted to die she would do it on her own terms dammit so she would not let herself be daunted and she would not hesitate.  
She eased her weight onto her bad leg, relying less on the wall as she took a deep breath, bracing herself. Then, she lifted her left leg completely, her other side screaming in protest as her foot swung forward to grasp purchase on the floor in front of he-

Oh Shit- Oww- What the Fuck?

She should have hesitated, Clarke fucking Griffin be damned, god, she should have hesitated.

She's not stupid, of course she fully intended to check for uneven ground before stepping forward and relying on whatever lay ahead to support her wait. There were just a few problems with that: 1) she severely underestimated how screwed her leg was and 2) she had, at the very least, expected there to be something in front of her. Of all of the not-ark-not-cave-not-outside scenarios that had crossed her mind, none of them had actually involved someone taking the time to put her on a bed.

That's right, Clarke Griffin, who has survived on Earth with nothing but sheer willpower and a course on Earth skills the syllabus of which was the compiled knowledge of the few former boy scouts who were scientists on the original stations, was thwarted by a three foot drop in the dark. She had tumbled straight down, hurting her leg even more, and as she fell her flailing arms made purchase with something solid and wooden. At first she thought it was a small sort of table, but as it toppled the protrusion from the top that hit her in the head marked it as a chair. The god awful noise it made as it clattered to the floor beside her marked it as a nuisance.

She lay groaning on the floor, the chink of light, that she could now surmise was from a window, gone from her mind as her biggest concern was now the attention she had undoubtedly brought to herself. She knew, somewhere beneath the fog quickly entering her freshly bruised head, that she had to keep moving, escape, get away before her apparent keepers respond to the racket she had just made. She knew it but just couldn’t find it in herself to do anything. It was a strange sensation, like the darkness filling the room was seeping into her mind, weighing down her eyes.

She couldn’t fight it, and the last thing she knew was the light that suddenly flooded the room. Her eyes couldn’t adjust to the sudden change and she couldn’t make out any details. She fought the haze and the light to try and see but all she could make out was a silhouette making its way towards her before her eyes rolled back in her head and she could see no more.


End file.
